Ogeechee Honey

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. If you look at the USC Herbarium’s plant distribution list, you’ll see that only in Jasper and Beaufort Counties has Ogeechee lime, Nyssa ogeche, been documented. It’s greatest distribution is in a swath of Georgia and the upper panhandle of Florida. Bee keepers take hives into these sites, sometimes floating them on platforms, to produce this very valuable white ogeechee honey. It’s high fructose to sucrose content helps prevent crystallization. It’s considered a single flower or monofloral honey, and boy, oh, boy, the bee keepers really have to work to produce it. Other plants including other species of nyssa bloom earlier, bees are allowed to collect from those plants but then new combs must be inserted when the later blooming Ogeechee species come into flower. The honey is actually analyzed by pollen to insure its truly from just those trees.